"Allow exile journalist to return home"

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Tuesday - September 29, 1998

Paris (dpa) - The World Association of Newspapers urged on Tuesday Vietnam to allow journalist Doan Viet Hoat to return home from exile in the United States.

The fact that Hoat had to leave Vietnam following his release in September, after a total of more than 20 years in jail, was no solution to the problem of the lack of freedom of speech in the country, the Paris based association said.

Hoat, who had probably been Vietnam's best known prisoner of conscience, was released by Hanoi under an amnesty marking the September 2 national day. He has consistently called for economic reforms the country.

The association earlier this year gave Hoat its Golden Pen of Freedom award.

Appeal to World Bank to aid independent media

SOURCE: World Association of Newspapers (WAN), Paris - Oct. 5, 1998

(WAN/IFEX) - The World Bank, failing to sufficiently consider the "watchdog" role of the media in ensuring that financial aid programmes are properly managed, should make independent media an "investment priority" in nations where its programmes are carried out, WAN said at a World Bank meeting.

Speaking at the presentation of the World Bank's new "World Development Report on the Knowledge Economy," the WAN Director General, Timothy Balding, criticised the Bank for including "only two or three minor references to the role of free media" in the 280-page report on information gathering and dissemination.

"The existence of strong, free media is not merely one among a multitude of factors important to the development and dissemination of knowledge, it is right at the heart of the solution," he said. "The media - notably newspapers -- are the primary check, monitor and revealer of incompetence, mismanagement, corruption, lack of transparency and absence of accountability in all areas of government policy and action," he said. "But all over the developing world, and in countless countries making the transition to democracy and a market economy, newspapers with excellent journalists have failed to accomplish their mission because they have failed as businesses," Balding said.

He said the establishment of an independent press in developing and transitional countries can only be ensured by a major external effort to aid the creation of economically viable newspapers. "But no such effort exists," he said. "If no one contests the vital link between a free press, transparent and honest government, and economic and political stability, few institutions charged with a development mission draw the natural conclusion -- that the creation of stable, independent media must be an aid and investment priority."

Balding outlined several steps that could be taken to aid independent media, whose needs include: skills and information transfer, principally in management; establishment of professional organizations; capital investment and material aid; and effective infrastructures. "In short, we know where to help, we know how to help. Only the means lack," he said.